Playing Audiobooks on a Car Stereo using Linux

As mentioned in
Raising Alex in Two Languages,
I'm experimenting with audiobooks as a way to keep my bilingual son
immersed in his minority language, during the drive to school.

Although there are a few good free sources of shorter audio stories,
they're limited, so one quickly starts looking for commercial offerings.
The best one I've found so far is
Audible.com,
or rather,
Audible.de.
I now have a monthly subscription to Audible, and have bought about ten
audiobooks from them.

My car stereo can play CD's and .mp3 files (on usb key or cd-rom),
which poses a challenge, since Audible's books are delivered in
a proprietary format not handled by most audio devices. Fortunately,
The Man has not yet tightened his grip enough to make it impossible
to convert from the fully closed proprietary .aax format to a more
open one like .mp3.

While there are probably simpler methods out there,
the method I'm using is as follows.

On an Ubuntu system, install wine, and use that to install Audible Manager (not Audible Download Manager), e.g. with 'winetricks audible'.

Import or download your .aax books with Audible Manager, and verify it can play them.
It should, as long as you don't try to pause or rewind or anything... it's good for a straight through play of a book at high quality.

Install sox and lame, then use a script like the following to begin recording the speaker output to a file:

Transfer the .mp3 files to a usb key, insert in car stereo, and enjoy. But
please don't share the .mp3 files with anyone else - you paid for them, but
you only get to use one copy.

My car stereo can't fast forward or reverse in .mp3 files,
so I chop the recordings up into 20 minute segments with
mp3splt

I also play on an ipod; that required building
eyeD3 0.6.18 (the version
that comes with Ubuntu is 0.6.17, which is too old) and using -n %d -N %d to set the track
number, and -d 1 -D 1 to set the disc number; without those settings,
the ipod will play in random order rather than track order.
e.g.

Annoyingly, none of the tools on Ubuntu 11.10 seem to be able to
initialize or sync to my 3rd gen 4gb ipod shuffle. I had to use
iTunes on Windows for that.

Even more annoyingly, iTunes doesn't come with a signed driver, and
win 7 64 bits refuses to load unsigned drivers.
TS1369 is the appropriate
Apple support page, and
says "Note: During installation, if a message appears stating that the
software you are installing 'has not passed Windows Logo testing' click
Continue Anyway to continue installing the drivers." That no longer works;
Windows refuses to load the driver. Apple, you suck.